The Google Pac-Man Time Suck: Best Marketing Ploy Ever?

It was a rare marketing opportunity. In honor of Pac-Man's 30th
anniversary, Google transformed its homepage into a mini Pac-Man
video game. Across the world, white collar stiffs were spending hours
online playing the arcade throwback. Enter RescueTime, a company that
sells employee-monitoring software.

RescueTime claimed to have figured out the estimated
productivity cost of employees playing Pac-Man on the job. The
number was staggering. "Google Pac-Man consumed 4,819,352 hours of
time," wrote the RescueTime company blog. A time drain they say left a
$120 million hole in the economy. In no time, hundreds of blogs and websites linked to the post sending the company a
torrent of traffic and publicity. The statistic spread like
wildfire. "A productivity blog figured out that we wasted... over 4.8
million hours of time on Friday," reported CNN.

But a few days
after the media flurry, a pair of diligent thinkers have raised
doubts about RescueTime's findings. The first is Howard Steven Friedman, a
United Nations statistician and health economist. He doesn't
split hairs:

Probably the biggest reason why this argument is
incorrect is the assumption of substitution. This analysis assumes that
the time the worker spent playing Pac-Man substituted for productive
work. It ignores the fact that workers don't spend all of their hours at
the office at work and so a certain percent of time everyday is spent
on non-work activities whether that be lunch, talking around the water
cooler, playing with their new I-pad, chatting with friends or any other
of the countless activities available while we are at the office. The
Pac-Mac entertainment could easily have substituted for other non-work
activities which, of course, were not measured. Imagine someone has just
spent 10 minutes gobbling ghosts and then realizes that they still have
to do their work, they will either spend less time that work day on
other non-work activities (water cooler, I-pad...) or they will often
stay later.

Then there's Mitch Wagner, a technology enthusiast who
writes for Computer World. His arguments have more to do with
RescueTime's assumptions about worker productivity.

The study
fails to take into account the value of rest and play -- just as an
athlete performs better if he takes time out occasionally to relax and
rehydrate, a knowledge worker performs better if she takes the
occasional break during the day, and plays Pac-Man or looks at LOLcats
or does something else to let the brain cool down.

Also worth
mentioning is Friedman's second criticism about the likelihood that
workers would simply put in extra hours:

The author's false
argument about substitution also extends to the fact that the
calculation ignores that many workers will end up spending a little more
time at work in order to finish what they needed to accomplish that
day. Project work is less dependent on hours and more depending on
achieving milestones. Workers who are able to avail themselves to
Pac-Mac games in the middle of the day may often be on project work and
thus find themselves having to stay a little later to complete the work.

To see the company's
complete findings see here. Mathematical quibbling is always encouraged in our comments section.